Facebook says it will identify and demote links from users who post more than 50 times a day in News Feed
1. Recent Supreme Court IP Cases Through a Library Lens (via The Taper) Brian Feldman / New York Magazine : Signs You're a Spammer: Posting Incessantly Brandy Betz / Seeking Alpha : Facebook will demote News Feed links from spamming accounts Tim Peterson / Marketing Land : Facebook targets individual spammers with latest news feed tweak Tweets: Josh Constine / @joshconstine : Fb tells me it can't suspend spammers just for oversharing...but it can demote their crappy links in News Feed http://techcrunch.com/... Emil Protalinski / @epro : Welp, @Scobleizer is screwed. http://twitter.com/... Happy / @alex : they weren't already doing this? part XXXXXIIVIVIC http://twitter.com/... Alex Kantrowitz / @kantrowitz : If you post more than 50 times a day to Facebook, the company should make someone available to help you find other hobbies http://twitter.com/... Brian McCullough / @brianmcc : This is sort of epochal. For its whole life sharing has been job one. FB has been loathe to do ANYTHING to discourage it. http://twitter.com/... Kurt Wagner / @kurtwagner8 : Non-shocker: Facebook says that people who post 50+ times per day (!) are almost always posting spam or false news http://www.recode.net/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This move caps a rapid 2017 escalation in how Facebook polices News Feed quality: the year opened with the algorithm being trained to detect authenticity to suppress spammy and sensational stories, followed by May's post-level limits on clickbait that withheld or exaggerated information. What changes here is the unit of enforcement — instead of scoring individual posts, Facebook is scoring the poster, flagging any account that exceeds 50 posts per day and demoting its links wholesale.
The account-level framing matters because it sets a template: by 2021 Facebook would go further with limits on all posts from personal accounts that routinely spread misinformation. The July 2017 threshold rule is the first step down that path from judging content to judging senders.
First-order effects
- High-volume link posters — spammers above all, but also prolific legitimate sharers like Robert Scoble, whom TechCrunch's Josh Constine noted Facebook cannot suspend for oversharing — see their links' News Feed reach cut without any per-post violation.
Second-order effects
- Spam operations that relied on flooding the Feed with many links are pushed toward fewer, higher-quality posts or off-platform channels, while publishers competing for the same inventory gain relative visibility when volume-based competitors get demoted.
Third-order effects
- Distribution on Facebook increasingly depends on sender reputation rather than content alone — an account-behavior gate that, if the pattern holds through the scraped-content and misinformation rules that follow, makes News Feed reach contingent on sustained good standing rather than any single post's merit.
The trend: Facebook's News Feed governance is escalating from evaluating individual posts to enforcing account-level behavioral thresholds, making distribution a function of sender track record.